While writing numerous animal characters in his children’s books, E. B. White also scribed humorous biographical essays documenting his observations of man’s best friend—collected here. E. B. White has been called a defining voice... Read More

Perhaps any attempt to capture changing thought is necessarily rough. There is room in an expanding field to tussle with definitions and find new patterns; it is not yet time to focus discourse too narrowly. That’s the feeling of this... Read More

Celebrated American poet W.S. Merwin is notable not only for his accomplishments and prodigious output (publishing twenty-some poetry collections, twenty-some translations, and several books of prose since 1952), but for the shifts in... Read More

“There is hardly anything so elusive,” writes the celebrated Irish poet Eavan Boland, “as the way in which a poetic inheritance is sifted and re-arranged from one generation to the next.” This collection of essays tracks and... Read More

Reading Edward Hoagland, accomplished naturalist and writer, or rather, losing oneself in Hoagland’s muscular and multitasking prose, one is quickly convinced that the only reliable way to depict a place is by the written word. Alaskan... Read More

“The greatest theme in American literature,” writes Scott Russell Sanders, “is the search for right relations between humankind and nature, between civilization and wildness.” It is a theme central to Sanders’s own... Read More

“To know the dog,” writes Clarice Rutherford, “you must first know the wolf.” Dogs, who have evolved to live with humans, can make wonderful companions if their humans understand them and teach them good manners for living in... Read More

“Tradition,” writes Kevin Young, “is not what you inherit, but what you seek, and then seek to keep.” In this book, winner of Graywolf Press’s Nonfiction Prize, Young ranges over his own cultural inheritance, exploring,... Read More